A week ago I was in Nicaea, now the small and not very distinguished small Turkish town of Iznik, notable more for its reputation as the producer of wonderful ceramic tiles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than for being the place of two ecumenical councils of the Church. The ruined shell of the Church of the Holy Wisdom marks the place of the seventh council. Only a few blocks of stone lapped by the lake waters stand as the site of the palace of Constantine where the first Council was held and the basis of the Nicene Creed drafted. Later that same day, Orthodox Easter, I attended the Easter Liturgy at the Phanar, presided over by Patriarch Bartholomew, with a crowded congregation welcoming the Resurrection. There would have been no Christians to do this in Nicaea, and in Constantinople itself there are now only very small Christian populations and most of those at the Easter Liturgy were visitors from outside the city. Yet the Risen Christ was triumphantly proclaimed, and the great homily of St John Chrysostom was read: Christ is risen and the demons are fallen! Christ is risen, and hell has lost its prey! Christ is risen, and life reigns! Yes, indeed, In Christ shall all be made alive! Crucifixion is followed by resurrection, as Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and Noel Davey pointed out almost half a century ago, it is the deep rhythm, (the deep structure as a linguistic analyst like Chomsky might have said) of the New Testament, and more than that, of the Christian faith. We are baptised into Christ's death, we share in his resurrection, 'we are Easter people and Alleluia! is our song.'
Go to North Africa and you will see magnificent ruins of Christian churches, but no living Christianity. The same is true in some parts of the Middle East and in other places Christian communities are draining away. There are salutary reminders that although the Lord promised that the gates of hell should not prevail against his church, particular churches in particular places can and do wither and die.
John Henry Newman, perhaps the greatest English theologian of the nineteenth century, knew this. He had a keen historical sensibility. He was aware of the rise and fall of Christian communities. He was also one of the first theologians to be aware of the tensions of change and continuity, and of the challenge of an eternal gospel, a revelation of the truth of God given at a particular time and a particular place, which yet has to be expressed, and lived out in a world of change and flux. In one of the earliest books he wrote, The Arians of the Fourth Century, he studied the council held by that lake at Nicaea, and the divergent understandings of the nature of Christ, between the Arians who held Christ to be the pinnacle of created being, and Athanasius who maintained, sometimes against what seemed to be a huge majority stacked against him, and often from exile, that Christ was fully divine. He was - of one being, one underlying reality - with the Father, the source of all being. It could seem like Athanasius contra mundum - Athanasius against the world, a counter-culture to prevailing ideology (with all the temptations to pride, and the pure church, and the 'I even I only am left' of Elijah fleeing from Ahab into the desert, to be met with the God of faithfulness at Horeb who being known in the '.sound of thin silence' - the 'still, small voice' - caused Elijah to cover his face in awe and wonder at the knowledge that this strange God was with him, and had not let him down and would never let him go). It was Athanasius and not the Arians who in the end won the day. It is the faith of Athanasius and not of Arius that we profess in the Creed of Nicaea. And the reason why Athanasius was so insistent on his understanding of Christ was that only that truth was saving truth, only the radical identification of God with us in Christ offered to us the promise of eternal life. As he put it in epigrammatic form: 'God became man, that man might become God.' A phrase later expanded by Maximus the Confessor, 'that we are to become by grace, what he (Christ) is by nature.' Only so were we enabled to be, in the words of 11 Peter, 'partakers of the Divine nature.'
Newman built on Athanasius, whom he revered particularly among the Fathers, when he wrote in his hymn Praise to the Holiest in the height! of 'the higher gift than grace', though he was understanding grace in a Western and not Eastern way:
He was as critical of what his friend and mentor John Keble called 'the
nominalism of the day', the resolving of the high mysteries of faith into
mere verbal forms, or matters of opinion. He was as convinced as Coleridge
that 'the Almighty Goodness doth not dwell in generalities, nor abide in
abstractions.' Too much theology had been notional, and there was a
contemporary Protestantism which held only to a view of justification and
sanctification which maintained that God only held us to be righteous and
did not really transform us. For Newman the heart of the Gospel was the
indwelling Christ, and the life-giving and transforming power of the Holy
Spirit, for, in St Paul's words, we are to be 'changed into the likeness
of Christ from one degree of glory to another.'
This theology of transfiguration is part and parcel of the teaching of the Oxford Movement fathers. It underlies their emphasis on baptismal regeneration, the new birth in Christ in baptism to a supernatural life, a baptismal life which is continually renewed through the discipline of confession and absolution, and by the Christ who feeds us with his own life in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a holy mystery, a place of awe and wonder, for there Christ is present, and, as John Keble wrote in his Tract of Eucharistical Adoration, 'wherever Christ is, there He is to be adored.' The life which we share is sacrificial in character, for we are made one with the Christ who offers himself to the Father, continually consecrating himself for the love of both the Father and of those whom the Father has given him. In the memorable phrase of the ARCIC Common Statement on the Eucharist, 'we are drawn into the movement of his self-offering,' both in our own personal lives and in the corporate life of the Church as a whole. The Eucharist is the mystery of ourselves, as St Augustine taught, we are to be what we receive and receive what we are. It is there that we find the strength and the life given to us for the grounding of Christian marriage, that relationship which is to mirror the love that Christ has for his church, as St Paul teaches in Ephesians. It is there that the single are to find their singleness fashioned into the universal love of Christ, whose singleness was part of his consecration to his Father. St Augustine knew well before Sigmund Freud that the dynamic of human being is a dynamic of love, a love which, if not directed towards the God of love in whose image we are made, will be self-directed, or shaped towards and by other gods and other goals. 'Set love in order', he wrote a phrase echoed by many of the Western masters of the spiritual life; or rather allow the life-giving Spirit, who floods our hearts ( which mean our wills before it means our feelings), to hallow and direct that love aright.
Christians are called to live a super-natural life, a life of grace transforming nature. It is the life of the new creation, that new order which burst upon the world at Easter, overwhelming the women who went to the tomb to anoint a dead body so that they fled in terror, 'and they said nothing to anyone for they were overcome with awe.' The new life we are called to live and to proclaim both fulfills the order of creation, and runs counter to the values of a fallen world. There is a distinctiveness about Christian faith and life, and the images that Jesus uses remind us of that - the salt that is useless if it loses its saltness, the yeast which is vital to make the dough rise, the light which shines in the darkness and dispels it. We are called to holiness, and holiness is above all an attribute of God. It is God's awesome otherness that we are called to share, his radiant glory which is to shine in our lives, and the life which is Christ's and which is Christ is to be so part of us and we so part of it that like St Paul we may cry 'I live, yet not 1, but Christ lives in me!' or, as we pray in the Prayer of Humble Access in the Eucharist, we receive the life of Christ 'that we may ever more dwell in Him and He in us.' It was William Law, the author of that eighteenth century Anglican devotional classic, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, who said simply, A Christ not in us is a Christ not ours.
This living heart of the Gospel is about a growth in holiness. It is the life of the Spirit in the Church, and therefore in our lives; and prayer, and sacrament, and the reading of scripture, and the meditating upon it, are all an opening of ourselves to the generosity of the God who sustains us with his life, the God who is Trinity, a communion of love. The Church lives in the life and power of the Trinity. By the Spirit we are renewed and shaped in the image of Christ, who is himself the perfect reflection of the Father's glory, and so we are brought home to the Father's heart, whose heart went out to us when we were still far off, and gave his Son who emptied himself, made himself nothing, to come down to where we are. As the Lady Julian of Norwich said, 'the goodness of God is our highest prayer, and it comes down to the lowest part of our need.' Or, as the seventeenth-century preacher, Mark Frank, preaching on Christmas Day, exclaimed, 'By this day's emptiness we all were filled.' [When I was on new bishop's training we had a professor of Organisation studies come to speak to us. You will, she said, be running an Organisation, and in every Organisation there are three things you must remember - people are not clones, they are unique and therefore there is always 'mystery'; they need models to follow; and they need to feel they belong, that they are 'members.' I put my hand up and said, 'Well, that is the Holy Trinity - the mystery of the Father, the model of the Son, and the membership of the Holy Spirit.' The Trinity is there, in the undergrowth even of our secular institutions for we human beings are made in the image and likeness of the triune God.]
In Christ shall all be made alive! - that was the first part of my title. The second was Living Tradition and the Life of the Church. The two of course belong together, though I have been reminding us of the indwelling Christ, and the Easter life of the new creation, mediated to us by sacraments and scripture, and by the whole worshipping life of the Church. Newman grasped this through his reading of the Scriptures and then of the Fathers, and he saw powerfully that tradition was not in the Christian sense a kind of lumber room of ecclesiastical practice, or a collection of precedents from past centuries. Like the Orthodox churches he saw tradition as fundamentally the life of the Spirit in the church, the Spirit who, according to St John's Gospel, was promised to lead us into all truth, and to take of the things of Christ and make them known to us. Incarnation is about historical incarnation - we know of no other kind - and just as Jesus lived in history, at a particular time and at a particular place, so the Church lives in history. Newman was aware that it took time to reach understanding, that human beings both know immediately and intuitively, but then have to wrestle with questions of understanding and meaning. Jesus said to the fishermen by the sea of Galilee Follow me! and they left all and followed him. The response of faith is immediate, but faith has to go on, as Anselm would recognise, to seek understanding--fides quaerens intellectum Belief, the act of faith, in one sense is the result of cumulative probabilities leading to an act of assent,, and in another is an assent whose dimensions and character have to be subsequently worked out. As that perceptive Anglican poet, T.S.Eliot, said, until that moment 'when we arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.'
When Newman studied the Arian controversy and all that led up to the Council of Nicaea in the early church, he realised that it took time for the church to come to a mind, a common understanding. Only a critical moment, such as that provoked by Arius and his teaching, would lead to a conciliar decision, and then he knew that that very decision itself took time to be assimilated and owned as that which was right to be believed and prayed - that which was orthodoxy. This study was part of what led him to wrestle with the question of the development of doctrine, a study which was to reach its culmination with his Essay on Development which he wrote as he moved from the Church of England to the Roman Catholic Church. It still retains a significance for anyone concerned with the question of revealed religion in the context of changing culture. What is essential to note is that the simplistic idea that all change is and must be development is far from Newman's concerns, even though I have heard many speakers on many occasions justify any particular change in Christian teaching or practice as a development.
Newman is clear that if there is change in the expression of the
Christian faith it is change on principle. As he puts it at one point 'it
changes always in order to remain the same.' Jesus Christ is the same
yesterday, today and forever, yet what that meant was expressed
differently by the Council of Nicaea than in earlier theologies. Newman
famously sets out a number of 'tests' or 'notes' which can serve to enable
us to judge whether any particular development that it is in accord with
or at variance from the faith that has been received - we remember St Paul
in I Corinthians speaking of the Eucharist, I handed on to you that which
I also received - the word for 'handing on' ((being linked with
(tradition)). These notes are such things as:
Newman was faced with the whole question of development both from his studies as an historical theologian, and from his growing attraction to the Church of Rome and his disillusionment with Anglicanism. For one who remained firmly grounded in Scripture and the Fathers the problem he had with Rome was that it seemed to have added to the faith in an unwarranted way. His Essay on Development was, he said, 'an hypothesis to account for a difficulty'. For Newman it led to the conclusion that there must be an ultimate authority to judge the truth or falsity of any development, an authority of course bound by scripture and tradition, because any development we may talk of must be in an of that faith 'uniquely revealed in the holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds.' He found that authority in Rome, where he saw a charism or gift of authority, though interestingly when it came to the First Vatican Council in 1870 Newman was to be found among the inopportunists. Papal authority he recognised, he did not think it necessary to define it infallibly, though he accepted the definition when it was made.
Newman put his finger on a real question for Anglicans - the locus of Anglican authority. Holy books need interpreters, and therefore there need to be both a canon of scripture, the wisdom of the Fathers, and those who have authority to judge and interpret. For historical reasons Anglicans, who began with a national church expanding overseas, have been weak on a Communion-wide authority, and any observer can see how there has been a steady attempt to provide the Communion with instruments of communion and, indeed, authority. Quite apart from ecumenical dialogue between Anglicans and Roman Catholics issuing in such documents as the recent Gift of Authority, there has been a recognition of the need for some stronger authority at the universal level, with a corresponding request for restraint and deference towards one another with the communion. Ecclesiologies of provincial autonomy are clearly understandings of the church which fall short of the unity of the church to which the New Testament points us, and to which the sense of the church catholic in the early centuries also witnesses. It has been saddening to see some of the resolutions of the Lambeth Conference deliberately and explicitly repudiated in some quarters on this side of the Atlantic, however unsatisfactory they may be judged to be.
Newman was well aware that doctrinal definition and the decisions of councils were only one aspect of that living tradition which was the life of the Church. He called such definitions 'episcopal tradition'. But all such episcopal tradition' was set within the framework of the 'prophetic tradition', that much larger, wider, and deeper process of transmission and handing on of the faith that is found in the worshipping and liturgical life of the church and its whole tradition of prayer and spirituality. In this area there is a kindling of the Christian imagination, an indwelling of the Christian symbolic universe, as we might put it, and it is through hearing the scriptures read in a liturgical context, and the round of feast and fast, in the Christian year that faith is transmitted. When Professor Nicolas Lossky wrote his fine study of bishop Lancelot Andrewes, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher, he subtitled it, The Origins of the Mystical Theology of the Church of England. It is a study of Andrewes' liturgical sermons, and Lossky shows how in his exploration of the great mysteries of the Christian Year Andrewes leads us from the Christmas mystery of 'God-with-us' to the Pentecost mystery of 'God-in-us'. It is an exposition of a Christian holiness grounded in and indwelling of the mysteries of our redemption.
Newman's use of the word 'prophetic' to describe this broader and deeper sense of tradition reminds us that for the Oxford Movement Fathers, the prophet and the poet were closely linked. They both had to do with the imagination. The importance of the Christian imagination in the understanding of a living tradition cannot be gainsayed, and Dr David Brown in his recent importance book, Tradition and Imagination has provided us with an important new theological study of tradition drawing in particular on the significance of the development of Christian art as a way in which new theological understandings emerge from within the Christian tradition to enrich and express its depth of meaning. And we might include with this the wonderful range of Christian music. The contribution of a contemporary British composer, Sir John Tavener, to Christian understanding by his creative use of Byzantine chant and music and liturgical themes from the Orthodox tradition is an outstanding example of this.
Living tradition and the life of the Church - the Church cannot be true to itself unless it lives and prays profoundly the mysteries of its salvation. Worship is not just an aesthetic experience, it is and should be a profoundly transforming experience, which takes us out of ourselves and deeper into Christ. 'The church will only convert the world by this deeper rooting in tradition. It is not by dismissing this part of the faith or that, but by exploring more deeply what it means, and, even more importantly, allowing the tradition to challenge us. It was once said that there are only two ways in which you can pray - 'starting from where you are,' and 'starting from where you are not.' Each of us has to encounter the tradition of which we are part from our own needs and longings, those wants 'which are the ligatures which bind us to God,' and allow ourselves to be challenged and questioned by the longing of God for us, to be transformed into the likeness of Christ from glory to glory.
We are to live from Christ our future by allowing Christ to be Lord in our lives and in our church. If Christ is Lord then we need not be afraid of the gift of authority. If Christ is Lord then we have no need to fall into the temptation of despair. If Christ is Lord then his Lordship must be shown in the holiness of our lives, in the transforming work of the Spirit, who takes our weak and frail human nature and makes it anew in the image of sacrificial love and service. In one sense we have no new Gospel. It is the faith once delivered to the saints. It is ever old and ever new, for like God's mercies it is new every morning. In Christ shall all be made alive. For Christ is risen. Alleluia! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!
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